‘The world is against us’: How Israel’s media is censoring the horrors of Gaza

Mourners react at the funeral of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 23 May 2025

Anat Saragusti writes in Haaretz on 28 May 2025:

It took the horrific outcome of an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis, which killed nine out of the ten children of the al-Najjar family, to push the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza into Israel’s TV news headlines. Momentarily.

Since October 7, 2023, and the start of Israel’s ground incursion in Gaza, there have only been a handful of reports on primetime mainstream media telling the story of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and only a bare scattering of reports on the huge scale of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, or the unimaginable civilian death toll, especially among children, who constitute around 18,000 of the victims, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Haaretz is the lone mainstream media voice covering all angles of the Gaza war, including daily reports on civilian casualties.

The images of tiny lifeless bodies being pulled out of the rubble, one after the other, were hard to watch. The story was heartbreaking. But even with a tragedy this sharp, the framing of the TV commentators focused on how Israel’s hasbara was not good enough, how Israel had neglected the international stage, and how it was failing to communicate the ‘Israeli side’ to the international community.

The average Israeli is still hardly exposed to what is going on in their name in Gaza. Yes, Israelis can access international news sites; they can choose to watch international TV channels available in Israel; they can click on a story or post on social media. But most Israelis don’t and won’t do that, and only partly because of the language barrier. Mainly, it’s because they don’t care.

Most Israelis have no capacity to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians. They are so deeply encompassed by their own grief and wartime burdens. Some Israelis are convinced that there are no innocent people in Gaza, that they all deserve to die. Some hope to reconstruct the lost national honor that Hamas trampled on October 7th by destroying Gaza and causing the immense death toll.

This may all be understandable in terms of what we know about human nature. But what is more incomprehensible is why the mainstream media in Israel is not doing its job: its fundamental mission to inform its viewers about the reality on the ground. The mainstream media is effectively aligning itself with the sentiments of the lowest common denominator of the Israeli audience, with those who think that all Gazans deserve to die.

This editorial decision not only betrays the core role of journalism, and not only betrays the need to serve the public interest, by telling the truth and collecting and presenting facts and evidence, but it also twists the narrative altogether – and this has dire repercussions.

While hundreds of millions of people across the world are watching in horror as the humanitarian crisis is unfolding, there are almost no reports in Israel. While viewers abroad see graphic images of the growing death toll and the rubble of more than 70 percent of all buildings in Gaza, the average Israeli sees nothing.

These images generate rage, anger and fear among people all over the world. And they react. They react in demonstrations, in posts on social media in op-eds and commentaries on mainstream media. Leaders all over the world receive calamitous reports. And those heads of states react by denouncing the mere trickle of aid Israel allows into Gaza, by warning about mass starvation, by threatening Israel with diplomatic and economic sanctions – amassing all possible legal means to pressure on Israel to end the war.

But the Israeli public does not understand the context of this pressure. Thanks to the one-sided coverage, Israelis don’t understand why the world is against us.

The mainstream media is actively cultivating the impression that global pressure is unjustified and the result of caprice or bigotry. It strengthens the sense that Israel is isolated because the world does not understand what happened to us on October 7, 2023. It fortifies the conviction that only we are the victims in this story, that there is no legitimate criticism against Israeli policy but only surging antisemitism. This approach may have been justified right after October 7. But 600 days into the war, this is no longer the case.

How can the average Israeli understand what is going on, close by in Gaza, and further away in the major cities of the world, when the national media self-censors itself, deliberately preventing public access to an essential piece of the puzzle and thus stifling the public discourse? The behavior of Israel’s media may have dramatic implications on the way Israelis view the continuation of the war.

If most Israelis are not aware of what is going on in Gaza, and what is being done in their name, if the mainstream media does not have the will or conscience to explain, then not only is it a grave failure, but it is actually contributing both to an inverted understanding of the suffering in Gaza and to rising calls for total revenge, eternal war, and the annihilation of Hamas, no matter the price.

Anat Saragusti is head of the freedom of the press section at the Union of Journalists in Israel

This article is reproduced in its entirety